Authors

Trudy E. Gilgenast

A native Delawarean, Trudy Gilgenast graduated from Pierre S. duPont High School in 1949, received a BA in Education from the University of Delaware in 1953 and an MA in German from Middlebury College, Vermont in 1957. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Student Exchange Scholarship to Munich in 1953-54 and a Fulbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship and a sabbatical from the University of Delaware in 1960-61 to teach at the Max-Josef Stift in Munich. Trudy taught German at the University of Delaware and served as Director of the University of Delaware student study abroad programs in Vienna, Austria and Bayreuth, Germany.

She was the recipient of the Certificate of Merit from the Goethe Institute and AATG in 1984, and the Federal Republic of Germany Friendship Award in 1987. She has lectured on German culture and contributions in Delaware at local schools through the Delaware Humanities Forum Scholars Program.

Quote of the day

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Samuel Butler

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

James Russell Lowell

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presagers of my speaking breast.

William Shakespeare

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Umberto Eco

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Ernest Hemingway

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.

Martin Tupper

A book is like a man-clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry.